Book 2: Written on the Body
I thought I would usually begin my book reviews with some kind of summary of what the book was about. But this book is not about plot. It is about words themselves, and the ways that they interact with feelings, and the possibilities of the interactions between words and feelings.
Why you should not read this novel:
You really should read it. I suppose you wouldn’t like it if you hate romantic love poems. Or maybe if you were homophobic. The back of the book says it is an "ungendered" narrator, but I read her as definitively female. If you have a problem with length, be heartened! It's not even very long. It does, however, require some concentration, because it's not as breezy as a Murakami novel, for example. The sentences are very complex. But they are complex because they are beautiful! You should read it.
Why you should read this novel:
It reminds me of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play by Edmund Rostand that I read in high school, because it is an extended love poem. Written on the
Body is so descriptive, so creatively full of metaphors, that it gives me hope. I'd thought that writing about just plain old love had run out of words to describe it simply because it had been gone over so many times. That clearly isn't the case. On the very first, beautiful page, the narrator states, "Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game. A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingoes." It is so full of metaphors and pondering that it is almost difficult to see what actually happens at the end: does she find her lover or not?
What it sparks in me:
If you've read the above, you have some idea of what it sparks in me. But what I didn't mention was anger and worry. The narrator has been in many different relationships. I cannot help wondering: is her vision of life too romantic, such that she takes none of them seriously enough and her sense of love will eventually become jaded? She mentions many different love affairs, all that ended terribly. She concludes that the feeling of love is worth it, even the pain, which makes me wonder if perhaps she enjoys the pain too much. If you see life and love on these beautiful terms, is it because you have become separated from reality, such that such loves are not truly possible, but only bolstered by lovely language? This seems to be a central theme in my blog: should we be worried by literature and what it does for our psyches? (I am tempted to argue no, but perhaps that is unfounded.)
I love the way this book concludes: "This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields."
In fact, this is a removal from literature. It says: I am no longer looking for a 'story' in life, I am letting it happen in beautiful moments such as this. I don't even want to make a conclusion, I want to enjoy reality with you, my beautiful lover, so I am giving up writing now. So the conclusion of the novel is that novels are hopeless (but still pretty nice).
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Haruki Murakami's Pathetic Female Characters
Murakami is one of my favorite authors of all time. I love that he is so prolific (this is a bad reason to love an author, I know), but in fact, I love that for the past year or two there is an almost endless supply of novels that he has written that I can take with me on my next trip. I used never to read more than the most famous book of an author, and then move on to the next (This makes me sound like a prick, but hear me out: a lot of times books become famous because they really are the best ones of a particular author). But I really got stuck on Murakami. I read them in the following order, just so you know where I'm coming from: Norwegian Wood; Kafka on the Shore; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; South of the Border, West of the Sun; and Sputnik Sweetheart.
What I love about Murakami is that his novels are so dazzlingly easy to read. On a surface level, they are themselves written like blog-posts, with a few more metaphors thrown in. Yet then there are truly beautiful moments: one conversation in Kafka on the Shore between central character Kafka and his friend Oshima about literature really stays with me, about how the flaws of a novel can be what makes it truly touching, because the emotions behind it are raw even if it is not as technically perfect. This rings true to me, and mirrors the very simplistic way in which he often writes. In Norwegian Wood there is a beautiful study of the psychology between Naoko and Midori. I felt myself simultaneously to be both Naoko and Midori: quiet and reserved with a strong sense of duty and a crippling amount of self-doubt, and also wild and free, sexy and approachable and fun. And I thought to myself, “This is what a novel is supposed to do: characters are beautiful to us because we relate to them, and they are interesting to the novelist because he has created them through the process of relating to them. So here we all are together, sharing the same mental space of this character. How lovely!”
But as I have read more Murakami novels, I have become a little disheartened, especially as I started noting a trend in his female characters. At first I thought it was because I was beginning to see the seams: there are certain metaphors that he reuses (being at the bottom of a well; this happens literally in the wind-up bird chronicle but is referenced other times in his other works). And then there are characters that he re-uses, particularly the emotionally stunted woman as opposed to the sexy fun woman: Nutmeg Akasaka, the fashion designer in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is just the same as Miss Seiki in Kafka on the Shore, or Miu in Sputnik Sweetheart, or Shinamoto and Izumi, both women from South of the Border, West of the Sun. The lively girls are Midori, May Kasahara, and Sumire.
But then I thought to myself that it had to be more than that, because for some reason I found some of them to be truly more relatable than others. Some of those characters seem unapproachable except from a sexual standpoint. In Norwegian Wood I loved Midori not because she had a sexy body, but because she said exciting things, she forced Toru to be more interesting.
Here I will go through novel by novel:
In Kafka on the Shore, I did not get distracted by my dislike of his female characters because they did not play particularly important roles in the novel. I was so interested in Kafka that I was happy enough with the interesting character of Oshima, and the sweet Nakata.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seemed like a very different kind of novel because of the prevalence of expository writing. For example, Murakami includes long passages describing Kumiko's childhood and the personality of her brother, Noboru Wataya. I found the description of Noboru Wataya was un-satisfactory. It seemed not to sketch a character, but to condemn him. I'm not sure if I am saying this well, but somehow I felt as though it was un-objective in some way, as if it were based on some really irritating person that Murakami met who he just went off on a tangent about. Furthermore, these descriptions really hijacked it from being about Kumiko, who we just don’t get much from (admittedly, this is also how the central character feels. We get nothing from her because she has run away with a lover). I felt that May Kasahara was really supposed to be like Midori, but somehow May just irritated me. I could not get over my feeling: why are you, some dumpy old middle-aged man, taking advantage of this lonely little sixteen-year-old's free time so you can stare at her bangin' body? I suppose this bothered me less in Midori because both the male narrator ad Midori were the same age in this novel.
In South of the Border, West of the Sun Hajime's affair made me really irrationally angry; perhaps it is my own experiences that make me react so violently to someone's "I had no choice but to go have sex with other people" statement. I just didn't feel appeased when his wife ultimately gets to say, "You just didn't think about how I would feel at all, did you?" I just felt as though the novel itself was a kind of justification. It was a recounting of 'what happened' in all of his exploits that created facts (all novels, in creating a story, create facts). He says, “I know it was wrong, but I would have done it all again if I could.” How can I accept that? How can he possibly be apologizing and saying that at the same time? It’s not an apology at all. But at the same time, I had to keep asking myself: am I being unreasonable? Am I only reacting this way because I am female? What if the roles had been reversed? I didn’t seem nearly as pissed at Kumiko in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle who is doing essentially the same thing. I still haven’t decided if that means I should condemn Kumiko more, or if I should indeed be more sympathetic towards Hajime.
In Sputnik Sweetheart, I just couldn't get out of my head the image of the main character as a kind of voyeur, wanting to come in on this hot lesbian couple. That makes it sound too simple; I know that the title character really loves Sumire, and for more than just her body. He loves her creativity, and her way of thinking about literature and the demands she makes of him. But her body simply became too prominent for me. It was too white and slender in contrast to the overweight yet sexy body of the male narrator’s girlfriend. In the parts that Sumire wrote, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading what a man thought a lesbian would write. I hate that I am having this reaction. It seems so terribly gendered, as if I cannot stand to read something from a perspective other than my own, or that I am unwilling to accept that other people can write from perspectives other than their own. How presumptive!
Finally I realized it was this: I only love Murakami when he succeeds in walking a fine line between insurmountable depression and realism. The insurmountable depression, moreover, must be realistic. I find it realistic when his characters shut down into a sort of insurmountable depression that flows along with the vicissitudes of daily life, rather than acting in vast, melodramatic ways. Naoko's suicide made me feel two ways: a little uncomfortable because I had related to her unhappiness, and what if that meant I was going to die? and then a little more comfortable, because I reacted by saying, "No, of course I would never do something like that. She was seriously crazy. In fact, we really aren't alike precisely because she commits suicide. Really, I'm much more like fun, cool Midori." But then I was insecure: I need to feel that I am different from such people or maybe something terrible will happen to me. The other female character in this story, the music teacher who lives with Naoko and seems to have an ambiguously romantic friendship with her, Reiko Ishida, overcomes her sadness and re-enters real life. Murakami expresses this desire to join life again when she goes out and has a big meal with Toru.
It seems to me that Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood are, after all, his most popular novels, and I think it is because those female characters are not so very hopeless. They seem more developed and relatable, and the novel is more interested in capturing how they feel than in some of the other novels.
Furthermore, I think I am justified in saying that South of the Border, West of the Sun really was less compelling. Because it got more melodramatic than it could handle: he sees his ex-girlfriend, who he cheated on, through a window and sees how her face is permanently changed, forever altered to be sad and hopeless. Similarly, this happens a few pages later to Hajime after his affair with Shinamoto falls through: "Something inside me was severed and disappeared. Silently. For ever." 179
I, like everyone else, just refuse to believe that. I can't take an entirely unhappy ending, because it is also unrealistic that endings are so very unhappy. Naoko’s suicide is just Naoko’s suicide, but if you try to say it is a human phenomenon of people living in a cloud of isolating unhappiness, that we are all, like the sputnik, hurtling through space alone, I just can’t agree in defense of my own happiness. Not that he comes down on that note. In the end, they always just go along with a little shrug and an, “oh well,” and keep picking their kids up from school, and making healthy meals with fish and vegetables. So aren’t those things incompatible? Can’t we answer the part about the Sputnik just by saying, “look at the pretty way that the light looks on these lovely green vegetables. What a beautiful color,” and concluding that the joy of looking at the vegetables outweigh the reality of hurtling through lonely, incommunicable space so that we keep on living? Why can’t you just end with a little, “I’m not a sputnik.” That would show a kind of hope towards the future. Or maybe a denile of reality in the process of summoning hope. At any rate, I feel the explicit statement needs to be made, or I’ll just sit here, unhappy that my unhappy book ended.
What I love about Murakami is that his novels are so dazzlingly easy to read. On a surface level, they are themselves written like blog-posts, with a few more metaphors thrown in. Yet then there are truly beautiful moments: one conversation in Kafka on the Shore between central character Kafka and his friend Oshima about literature really stays with me, about how the flaws of a novel can be what makes it truly touching, because the emotions behind it are raw even if it is not as technically perfect. This rings true to me, and mirrors the very simplistic way in which he often writes. In Norwegian Wood there is a beautiful study of the psychology between Naoko and Midori. I felt myself simultaneously to be both Naoko and Midori: quiet and reserved with a strong sense of duty and a crippling amount of self-doubt, and also wild and free, sexy and approachable and fun. And I thought to myself, “This is what a novel is supposed to do: characters are beautiful to us because we relate to them, and they are interesting to the novelist because he has created them through the process of relating to them. So here we all are together, sharing the same mental space of this character. How lovely!”
But as I have read more Murakami novels, I have become a little disheartened, especially as I started noting a trend in his female characters. At first I thought it was because I was beginning to see the seams: there are certain metaphors that he reuses (being at the bottom of a well; this happens literally in the wind-up bird chronicle but is referenced other times in his other works). And then there are characters that he re-uses, particularly the emotionally stunted woman as opposed to the sexy fun woman: Nutmeg Akasaka, the fashion designer in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is just the same as Miss Seiki in Kafka on the Shore, or Miu in Sputnik Sweetheart, or Shinamoto and Izumi, both women from South of the Border, West of the Sun. The lively girls are Midori, May Kasahara, and Sumire.
But then I thought to myself that it had to be more than that, because for some reason I found some of them to be truly more relatable than others. Some of those characters seem unapproachable except from a sexual standpoint. In Norwegian Wood I loved Midori not because she had a sexy body, but because she said exciting things, she forced Toru to be more interesting.
Here I will go through novel by novel:
In Kafka on the Shore, I did not get distracted by my dislike of his female characters because they did not play particularly important roles in the novel. I was so interested in Kafka that I was happy enough with the interesting character of Oshima, and the sweet Nakata.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seemed like a very different kind of novel because of the prevalence of expository writing. For example, Murakami includes long passages describing Kumiko's childhood and the personality of her brother, Noboru Wataya. I found the description of Noboru Wataya was un-satisfactory. It seemed not to sketch a character, but to condemn him. I'm not sure if I am saying this well, but somehow I felt as though it was un-objective in some way, as if it were based on some really irritating person that Murakami met who he just went off on a tangent about. Furthermore, these descriptions really hijacked it from being about Kumiko, who we just don’t get much from (admittedly, this is also how the central character feels. We get nothing from her because she has run away with a lover). I felt that May Kasahara was really supposed to be like Midori, but somehow May just irritated me. I could not get over my feeling: why are you, some dumpy old middle-aged man, taking advantage of this lonely little sixteen-year-old's free time so you can stare at her bangin' body? I suppose this bothered me less in Midori because both the male narrator ad Midori were the same age in this novel.
In South of the Border, West of the Sun Hajime's affair made me really irrationally angry; perhaps it is my own experiences that make me react so violently to someone's "I had no choice but to go have sex with other people" statement. I just didn't feel appeased when his wife ultimately gets to say, "You just didn't think about how I would feel at all, did you?" I just felt as though the novel itself was a kind of justification. It was a recounting of 'what happened' in all of his exploits that created facts (all novels, in creating a story, create facts). He says, “I know it was wrong, but I would have done it all again if I could.” How can I accept that? How can he possibly be apologizing and saying that at the same time? It’s not an apology at all. But at the same time, I had to keep asking myself: am I being unreasonable? Am I only reacting this way because I am female? What if the roles had been reversed? I didn’t seem nearly as pissed at Kumiko in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle who is doing essentially the same thing. I still haven’t decided if that means I should condemn Kumiko more, or if I should indeed be more sympathetic towards Hajime.
In Sputnik Sweetheart, I just couldn't get out of my head the image of the main character as a kind of voyeur, wanting to come in on this hot lesbian couple. That makes it sound too simple; I know that the title character really loves Sumire, and for more than just her body. He loves her creativity, and her way of thinking about literature and the demands she makes of him. But her body simply became too prominent for me. It was too white and slender in contrast to the overweight yet sexy body of the male narrator’s girlfriend. In the parts that Sumire wrote, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading what a man thought a lesbian would write. I hate that I am having this reaction. It seems so terribly gendered, as if I cannot stand to read something from a perspective other than my own, or that I am unwilling to accept that other people can write from perspectives other than their own. How presumptive!
Finally I realized it was this: I only love Murakami when he succeeds in walking a fine line between insurmountable depression and realism. The insurmountable depression, moreover, must be realistic. I find it realistic when his characters shut down into a sort of insurmountable depression that flows along with the vicissitudes of daily life, rather than acting in vast, melodramatic ways. Naoko's suicide made me feel two ways: a little uncomfortable because I had related to her unhappiness, and what if that meant I was going to die? and then a little more comfortable, because I reacted by saying, "No, of course I would never do something like that. She was seriously crazy. In fact, we really aren't alike precisely because she commits suicide. Really, I'm much more like fun, cool Midori." But then I was insecure: I need to feel that I am different from such people or maybe something terrible will happen to me. The other female character in this story, the music teacher who lives with Naoko and seems to have an ambiguously romantic friendship with her, Reiko Ishida, overcomes her sadness and re-enters real life. Murakami expresses this desire to join life again when she goes out and has a big meal with Toru.
It seems to me that Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood are, after all, his most popular novels, and I think it is because those female characters are not so very hopeless. They seem more developed and relatable, and the novel is more interested in capturing how they feel than in some of the other novels.
Furthermore, I think I am justified in saying that South of the Border, West of the Sun really was less compelling. Because it got more melodramatic than it could handle: he sees his ex-girlfriend, who he cheated on, through a window and sees how her face is permanently changed, forever altered to be sad and hopeless. Similarly, this happens a few pages later to Hajime after his affair with Shinamoto falls through: "Something inside me was severed and disappeared. Silently. For ever." 179
I, like everyone else, just refuse to believe that. I can't take an entirely unhappy ending, because it is also unrealistic that endings are so very unhappy. Naoko’s suicide is just Naoko’s suicide, but if you try to say it is a human phenomenon of people living in a cloud of isolating unhappiness, that we are all, like the sputnik, hurtling through space alone, I just can’t agree in defense of my own happiness. Not that he comes down on that note. In the end, they always just go along with a little shrug and an, “oh well,” and keep picking their kids up from school, and making healthy meals with fish and vegetables. So aren’t those things incompatible? Can’t we answer the part about the Sputnik just by saying, “look at the pretty way that the light looks on these lovely green vegetables. What a beautiful color,” and concluding that the joy of looking at the vegetables outweigh the reality of hurtling through lonely, incommunicable space so that we keep on living? Why can’t you just end with a little, “I’m not a sputnik.” That would show a kind of hope towards the future. Or maybe a denile of reality in the process of summoning hope. At any rate, I feel the explicit statement needs to be made, or I’ll just sit here, unhappy that my unhappy book ended.
What this blog will now be about! Rebecca's Manifesto. And her first book review!
I have graduated from Swarthmore College, and now admit that my skills are totally useless. I've been spending four years doing what I love: reading books and writing about them. I don't just mean literature, I also mean history books and all kinds of other things. And most horrifically, all I've ever really wanted to become was a writer (like everyone else on the internet). Here's what I think: why the hell should I need a PhD in literature to write quality criticism?
I recently read a book by Doris Lessing called The Golden Notebook, and she said in her 1971 introduction to that book (which has since won numerous prizes) that she gets thousands of letters a year asking "for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important." She tells those kids, "why don't you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black." She never went to college, and educated herself entirely by reading whatever she thought was worthwhile. In her opinion, literary critics usually focus on things that are stupid and petty, and have arbitrary standards for what makes good literature. Because she wrote popular books and has won a Nobel prize, she must be right (irony intended). In all seriousness though, I agree with her.
Now I intend to create my own kind of literary criticism. And just like Doris Lessing said, now that I have graduated, I plan never to read literary reviews again. Keeping up with modern literary thought be damned! I will not even be constrained to writing about books that have been recently published, to help you determine whether or not you should buy it. THIS BLOG will be about whatever book I have most recently read. That said, I will only write about books that I liked for some reason or another, ones that spurred my thoughts. In fact, this is not actually because I am being 'individualistic' or even 'controversial,' it's because I am unemployed, and can only afford to buy books that have been out for a while. So those are the ones that I will review! My formats will hopefully be somewhat like the way I reviewed the following.
Book 1: The Golden Notebook
This novel has several layers. It is about a writer, Anna Wulf, formerly Anna Freeman, who wrote a novel several years ago but cannot seem to produce another piece of work. Instead, she keeps several notebooks. A yellow notebook contains a novel she is writing about a sort of ultra-ego, Ella, who is having an affair with a man named Paul. It is pretty clear that it is an autobiographical novel about Anna and the man she has an affair with, Michael. Interestingly, Ella the character is also writing a novel, about a man who is taking all of the steps in his life towards suicide without recognizing it until one day he decides to commit it (psychological question: were they really leading up to suicide, or did it just seem that way when he was depressed and finally thinking about doing it?). A blue notebook contains a record of her thoughts and feelings, for a time recording daily events, and later in describing her attitudes in a much later affair she has with an emotionally abusive American writer. A red notebook records Anna's disillusionment with the communist party. There is also a novel, Free Women, that serves as a frame for the whole network of notebooks, written in third person about Anna (and presumably by Anna once she gets herself together and finally produces another piece of literature). The Golden Notebook is a notebook that she creates at the end of the novel to try to tie the parts of her disparate life together, although it is hardly so conclusive; reading the description on the back of the book I had expected that it would all come together at this point, but in fact, her relationships with these people simply desintegrate and you get the feeling that the book just sort of ends rather than finding some sort of greater truth to take home (which I realize would have been a silly thing for me to expect given the tone of this novel: this book is painfully realistic, and life does not offer answers so cleanly).
Why you should not read this book:
It is very long, and it will make you very sad. It sucks you into a world of discontentment; in fact, brooding is even a theme in the novel. Young Tommy, the son of the friend whose house she lives in for some time with her daughter, accuses her of condemning the whole world in her little private notebooks and then refusing to give the world a chance to respond by refusing to publish. It also means there are hundreds of pages of beautiful, intensely dense analysis of the loneliness that she feels, of the cruelty of the thoughtless or emotionally abusive men with whom she has affairs.
Why you should read this book:
This book feels incredibly complete to me because it tells the same events in so many different ways, from so many different perspectives. I loved that it created such a wide universe of explanation. She is able to abstract into Anna or concentrate into an 'I' which allows for multiple ways of seeing and explaining the same unexplainable phenomena. I love novels best when they try to explain something un-explainable. Here are the un-answerable questions: how did this happen to me? Why do I feel this horrible way that I do? It centers around that trauma and offers a variety of explanations: this guy is a jerk, society is arranged such that women have horrible opportunities and little choice such that they end up with jerks, this was the person who she happened to meet at a particular time in her life and somehow through chance they came together. And of course there is ultimately no answer to all of this, just a very thoughtful, painful pondering.
What it sparked in me:
What is the use of thinking and pondering all of the horrible things that have happened in your life? Is there ultimately something wrong in saying how you feel? If you feel horrible, and you say that you feel horrible, does it simply confirm your suspicion that you feel horrible, whereas you could have said nothing at all, and perhaps you would have been distracted by something else and ultimately felt a different way? If you hadn't explicitly said you felt horrible, when you thought back on that time you might just remember the feeling after it, in which case maybe you never have felt really horrible after all...
Being happy is a very difficult thing to accomplish. Novels that seem meaningful in this way, that seem to grow out of some kind of trauma and try to explain something have been so powerful to me in the past (I am thinking of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Bone by Fae Myenne Ng). But I am always wondering this same thing: is creating out of a process of brooding necessarily bad?
Especially as a blogger, I feel that people write not necessarily to be heard, but to remind themselves that they are alive. You need to articulate a voice that could be heard, even if it isn't, so that you can be sure it is really there, that your process of observing the world must be an active one if you are able to spout on about it: I do exist! Because I read this book! Or I saw that movie! Or I walked outside and I saw a gorgeous sunset and then said to myself: "The yellow ball of the sun disappeared behind the rapidly greying bay, leaving a smear of yolky orange behind as Mr. Jones, seeing but unobservant, tried to find a way to cross the road without bumping into a confused tourist gazing across the water."
Novels about trauma turn out beautiful and real because they seem vitally important, the emotions seem to really matter. They are enjoyable because of the emotional sensation that they cause, not because they offer life lessons. But are articulating those emotions as a writer, or experiencing them as a reader, eventually only harmful to your emotional health, especially given that books like these never come to a satisfactory conclusion? I think Lessing herself wonders this about her book. She calls Anna's previous novel a 'negative' one that never helped anyone. So what's the point?
Note: Doris Lessing said that she hates blogs in her Nobel prize speech. Probably because they are narcissistic and use a bunch of emotional energy without forming them into something meaningful (like a novel). But wait...that's exactly what Anna does in her notebooks...And even the conclusion that leads her to write a second novel just sparks these emotional sensations that cause more questions in an endless cycle of circling around feelings and events. So what's the point?
I recently read a book by Doris Lessing called The Golden Notebook, and she said in her 1971 introduction to that book (which has since won numerous prizes) that she gets thousands of letters a year asking "for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important." She tells those kids, "why don't you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black." She never went to college, and educated herself entirely by reading whatever she thought was worthwhile. In her opinion, literary critics usually focus on things that are stupid and petty, and have arbitrary standards for what makes good literature. Because she wrote popular books and has won a Nobel prize, she must be right (irony intended). In all seriousness though, I agree with her.
Now I intend to create my own kind of literary criticism. And just like Doris Lessing said, now that I have graduated, I plan never to read literary reviews again. Keeping up with modern literary thought be damned! I will not even be constrained to writing about books that have been recently published, to help you determine whether or not you should buy it. THIS BLOG will be about whatever book I have most recently read. That said, I will only write about books that I liked for some reason or another, ones that spurred my thoughts. In fact, this is not actually because I am being 'individualistic' or even 'controversial,' it's because I am unemployed, and can only afford to buy books that have been out for a while. So those are the ones that I will review! My formats will hopefully be somewhat like the way I reviewed the following.
Book 1: The Golden Notebook
This novel has several layers. It is about a writer, Anna Wulf, formerly Anna Freeman, who wrote a novel several years ago but cannot seem to produce another piece of work. Instead, she keeps several notebooks. A yellow notebook contains a novel she is writing about a sort of ultra-ego, Ella, who is having an affair with a man named Paul. It is pretty clear that it is an autobiographical novel about Anna and the man she has an affair with, Michael. Interestingly, Ella the character is also writing a novel, about a man who is taking all of the steps in his life towards suicide without recognizing it until one day he decides to commit it (psychological question: were they really leading up to suicide, or did it just seem that way when he was depressed and finally thinking about doing it?). A blue notebook contains a record of her thoughts and feelings, for a time recording daily events, and later in describing her attitudes in a much later affair she has with an emotionally abusive American writer. A red notebook records Anna's disillusionment with the communist party. There is also a novel, Free Women, that serves as a frame for the whole network of notebooks, written in third person about Anna (and presumably by Anna once she gets herself together and finally produces another piece of literature). The Golden Notebook is a notebook that she creates at the end of the novel to try to tie the parts of her disparate life together, although it is hardly so conclusive; reading the description on the back of the book I had expected that it would all come together at this point, but in fact, her relationships with these people simply desintegrate and you get the feeling that the book just sort of ends rather than finding some sort of greater truth to take home (which I realize would have been a silly thing for me to expect given the tone of this novel: this book is painfully realistic, and life does not offer answers so cleanly).
Why you should not read this book:
It is very long, and it will make you very sad. It sucks you into a world of discontentment; in fact, brooding is even a theme in the novel. Young Tommy, the son of the friend whose house she lives in for some time with her daughter, accuses her of condemning the whole world in her little private notebooks and then refusing to give the world a chance to respond by refusing to publish. It also means there are hundreds of pages of beautiful, intensely dense analysis of the loneliness that she feels, of the cruelty of the thoughtless or emotionally abusive men with whom she has affairs.
Why you should read this book:
This book feels incredibly complete to me because it tells the same events in so many different ways, from so many different perspectives. I loved that it created such a wide universe of explanation. She is able to abstract into Anna or concentrate into an 'I' which allows for multiple ways of seeing and explaining the same unexplainable phenomena. I love novels best when they try to explain something un-explainable. Here are the un-answerable questions: how did this happen to me? Why do I feel this horrible way that I do? It centers around that trauma and offers a variety of explanations: this guy is a jerk, society is arranged such that women have horrible opportunities and little choice such that they end up with jerks, this was the person who she happened to meet at a particular time in her life and somehow through chance they came together. And of course there is ultimately no answer to all of this, just a very thoughtful, painful pondering.
What it sparked in me:
What is the use of thinking and pondering all of the horrible things that have happened in your life? Is there ultimately something wrong in saying how you feel? If you feel horrible, and you say that you feel horrible, does it simply confirm your suspicion that you feel horrible, whereas you could have said nothing at all, and perhaps you would have been distracted by something else and ultimately felt a different way? If you hadn't explicitly said you felt horrible, when you thought back on that time you might just remember the feeling after it, in which case maybe you never have felt really horrible after all...
Being happy is a very difficult thing to accomplish. Novels that seem meaningful in this way, that seem to grow out of some kind of trauma and try to explain something have been so powerful to me in the past (I am thinking of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Bone by Fae Myenne Ng). But I am always wondering this same thing: is creating out of a process of brooding necessarily bad?
Especially as a blogger, I feel that people write not necessarily to be heard, but to remind themselves that they are alive. You need to articulate a voice that could be heard, even if it isn't, so that you can be sure it is really there, that your process of observing the world must be an active one if you are able to spout on about it: I do exist! Because I read this book! Or I saw that movie! Or I walked outside and I saw a gorgeous sunset and then said to myself: "The yellow ball of the sun disappeared behind the rapidly greying bay, leaving a smear of yolky orange behind as Mr. Jones, seeing but unobservant, tried to find a way to cross the road without bumping into a confused tourist gazing across the water."
Novels about trauma turn out beautiful and real because they seem vitally important, the emotions seem to really matter. They are enjoyable because of the emotional sensation that they cause, not because they offer life lessons. But are articulating those emotions as a writer, or experiencing them as a reader, eventually only harmful to your emotional health, especially given that books like these never come to a satisfactory conclusion? I think Lessing herself wonders this about her book. She calls Anna's previous novel a 'negative' one that never helped anyone. So what's the point?
Note: Doris Lessing said that she hates blogs in her Nobel prize speech. Probably because they are narcissistic and use a bunch of emotional energy without forming them into something meaningful (like a novel). But wait...that's exactly what Anna does in her notebooks...And even the conclusion that leads her to write a second novel just sparks these emotional sensations that cause more questions in an endless cycle of circling around feelings and events. So what's the point?
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